


Mistaken for Peace

by heartofthesunrise



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, M/M, i'm getting my masters degree in post-zayn studies, zayn's farm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 07:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12954309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: Harry is sat on his front porch in a pair of floral trousers and a blouse with an odd, asymmetrical ruffle slashed across the chest, armed with a scowl that could drop lesser men.-Or, Harry turns up at Zayn's farm after reading the interview where he alleges they never spoke in One Direction. Then they feed some chickens together.





	Mistaken for Peace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nolightss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nolightss/gifts).



“We never talked?”

There is a rolling, green landscape on every side of Zayn’s house. The sun is high. The distant bleating of livestock filters through the still air. It smells of home.

Harry is sat on his front porch in a pair of floral trousers and a blouse with an odd, asymmetrical ruffle slashed across the chest, armed with a scowl that could drop lesser men.

“You know what I meant,” Zayn says, because there’s no use pretending he doesn’t know what Harry’s talking about, on account of how he showed up here and all. It had been a stupid thing to say, probably, in the moment. Of course they talked, they lived in one another’s pockets for four years. They couldn’t avoid it.

More like, there were certain barriers in place. Unstable bridges left uncrossed. Like when he’d left it had been like seeing Harry through the wrong end of a telescope, all that distance between them even when they stood right next to each other. And all that had seemed like too much to give a Billboard journo who was pitching him only softballs, so he’d said. Well.

Harry stands up and brushes off the front of his trousers. He’s an anachronism in this place, this simple life Zayn is hammering into place. Zayn looks down at his feet. Boots scabbed with dried mud. Blue jeans. His hands and arms, which have browned in the sun all summer, dark enough that his tattoos could almost be the suggestion of a pattern under his skin.

“So you’re… What. A farmer, now?” Harry asks. He’s following Zayn’s own gaze, taking in the lines of him.

What Harry doesn’t understand - what he has never seemed to grasp, in all their years as friends - is what a luxury it is to be able to define himself by what he _does,_ rather than what he _is._ There are the obvious things: Zayn is Muslim, despite not having set foot in a mosque in more than a year; Zayn is Pakistani, he supposes, though he’s never been to Pakistan. He’s a singer, which is itself a kind of doing, but then, so much of it was decided for him and contracted out that it feels more like an assigned label anyway.

But he’s a farmer, because farming is what he’s doing right now. When he stops, he won’t be anymore. It’s a relief to deal in such absolutes.

“Guess so,” he tells Harry. He folds his work gloves together and tosses them onto the porch step. It would be peak Harry Styles to hunt down Zayn’s barely-known address, hire a car, and come out to deliver one wounded line before fucking off again. Zayn tries to pre-empt him, for what it’s worth. “Are you coming inside?”

And to his surprise, Harry brushes down the legs of his trousers one more time before giving a curt nod and following Zayn in.

-

Harry is let into a guest room with south-facing windows, which let in slats of buttery afternoon light. Zayn leaves him, then returns a few minutes later with a spare white t-shirt, a battered pair of sun-greyed Converse, and a pair of jeans that Harry already knows will be too short on him and will dig into his hips.

He changes clothes in silence. He leaves his trousers and shirt half-heartedly folded on the bedspread.

It’s bizarre to see Zayn in any context. Apart from Louis’ X-Factor performance last year, the great whirling machinery of celebrity life had been careful not to invite them to the same events, to force their respective hands. Harry had listened to Zayn’s record, of course, and declined to comment on it although it was littered with moments of true, multifaceted beauty. He expects Zayn has heard his album at least once, although who knows, with Zayn, anymore.

The jeans fit about as poorly as Harry’d expected, pinching him at the waist, the hem hitting at least two centimeters above his bony ankles. The shirt is soft, though, and it smells of cedar, like a proper old closet. Like now that Zayn isn’t confined to living out of a duffel bag all the time he’s hungry for the trappings of a stationary life.

Maybe that’s what this whole farm venture is about.

Maybe Zayn’s just a weirdo.

He wanders back downstairs, peering into half-shut rooms and around corners, searching for evidence of… Of what? He doesn’t know. As he does, Harry wonders if Zayn has a therapist.

This could be some sort of medically-suggested self-isolating rehab routine.

Zayn _must_ have a therapist, Harry concludes, because everyone with any money has a therapist, especially if they’ve publicly disclosed things like _having a secret eating disorder,_ which still makes Harry spitting furious with guilt. It wasn’t as though they didn’t _know,_ not _really,_ only every one of them was so strange and frayed then, and it seemed easier to wait for it to pass than to do the difficult work of figuring out which problems needed attention, and what to do about them. On the drive over he’d googled some of the last pictures of the five of them together and had had to put his phone aside and put his face in his hands. Zayn’s brittle smile. His concave chest. The bruised look of the skin under his eyes.

Harry was an idiot.

Zayn is waiting for him downstairs, checking his phone, his hair pulled messily back from his face with an elastic. Harry has a sudden, acute memory of asking Zayn for a hair tie some night after a show - one of their last shows - and how Zayn had pulled four elastic bands off his own wrist and dropped them into the dry cradle of Harry’s palm with a wink.

“What would you do without me,” Zayn had said around a laugh. Yeesh.

Zayn looks up from his phone and nods to him, then jerks his head towards the front door. “Got some chores left to do,” he says. “Best make yourself useful.”

-

Another of the things Harry doesn’t seem to understand about Zayn - and now that he’s thought of two, he supposes he’s making a list, which is petty, but Zayn’s petty, so it’s par for the course as the lads who play golf would say - is that Zayn has never felt things by halves. He has spent the last two years feeling nothing for Harry, not even considering him - or any of them - out of a sort of crude attempt at self-preservation. Because here, with Harry wearing his jeans poorly and sweating as he lifts a burlap sack of chicken feed to scatter it across the hens’ enclosure, he feels everything rushing back into him.

He is so in love with Harry in this moment that he feels delirious with it, is forced to lean against the fencepost to catch his breath. He knows it will leave him again, in ten minutes, or two hours, or tomorrow when Harry isn’t in front of him any longer and Zayn is allowed, again, to feel nothing for him. It’s safer, he thinks.

While he waits for the moment to pass, he turns to gaze out across the fields he’s made no attempt to cultivate. It’s a beautiful property, it deserves someone who can work it to its full potential, but it’s too much for Zayn to do on his own, and he doesn’t like the thought of hiring anyone to do his farming for him. He doesn’t want strangers here, doesn’t want to go through the endless paperwork of vetting and distributing non-disclosure agreements to a bunch of farm hands who couldn’t care less about him. So the fields have gone to seed.

When he allows himself to slip into the familiar embrace of melancholy, Zayn likes to imagine letting kudzu overtake the farm. It starts where his fields border the forest, where the trees are dripping in cones of vines, where it grows faster than he can cut it back. It will spread across the fields, fighting for terrain against scrub grass and scotch broom and dandelions. It will cover the house, of course, first the outside, then it will creep through the windows and crawl across the ceiling, down the walls… Zayn imagines himself laying in bed, observing its slow progress, and how he will feel its tendrils grow over his arms and legs, and then the rest of him. How it will push into his open mouth and he’ll let it, so he’s of it, something green.

He shakes his head to clear it. Beside him, Harry has spilled a small mountain of chicken feed and the hens are going mad trying to peck it apart before he can clean it up.

“You know you can have chickens in just like, a regular city, right?” Harry asks him, straightening up. “Pay somebody to build a coop on your roof, easy as anything. Don’t have to go to the…” He gestures uselessly at the beautiful day. “Extremes.”

And Zayn doesn’t know how to tell him that the livestock are a tertiary concern, that the work he’s doing here is justifying the remoteness of location, not the other way around. He doesn’t know how to say to Harry that standing here in the middle of nowhere with him, with somebody who - though he’d rather not admit it in so many words - _knows_ him, makes him feel almost claustrophobic. The sky is a split open blue above them and there are no obstacles for miles and Zayn is pinned under the weight of Harry’s undivided attention.

“How did you find me?” he says finally. It’s been nagging him all morning.

Harry grins, actually, and stretches his clasped hands up over his head so that the sun shines through the space between his arms. He is golden.

“Niall,” he says. “He’s got a spreadsheet. You should stop changing your number on him, you know, he only calls because he loves you. You can’t just take yourself out of the world.”

Zayn had spoken to Niall over the summer, at some point - a perfunctory phone call that had left him feeling raw and strange for days afterwards. He doesn’t like that Niall can still love him, without his permission or his compliance. He hates it, actually. He’s profoundly grateful for it.

“Okay,” he says. He feels abruptly wrung out, and he slumps back against the fence post for a moment because he can’t help himself. “D’you want tea?”

-

Zayn’s kitchen is small and old-fashioned but Harry doesn’t miss the additions that have clearly taken place since he’s taken up residence: a ludicrously expensive espresso maker; a cabinet full of pop tarts; a freezer stocked with ready-to-eat garbage that Harry’s nutritionist would frown at. These odd remnants of the Zayn that Harry’s used to.

It’s so still here. Harry hasn’t checked his phone, even - didn’t want to be tempted to say something to the lads, or call a car to get out of here, or anything. He’d gone in determined to see what sort of life Zayn was making for himself without them. The whole experience makes him feel like he’s been trapped in amber somewhere very far away.

Harry gets it, sort of - that that’s the point. That this is as far as Zayn could take himself from the band without losing himself completely, or something. That this is a restorative measure Zayn’s taking. Only he wishes…

“Would you do it different?” he asks abruptly. Zayn is lifting the kettle and pouring hot water into two mugs on the counter. The lean muscles in his back shift under his t-shirt. “Quit sooner, or…”

Zayn lets the silence hang there. He’s gotten more comfortable with silence, Harry can’t help but notice. Maybe having cows and horses as conversational partners is good practice for him.

At a loss, Harry continues. “It just got a lot fucked up there, at the end,” he says. “So I thought -”

“Harry are you trying to apologize to me?” Zayn puts his mug to his lips and blows across the surface of his tea, so that little ripples form.

Is he? Harry doesn’t know. Maybe. “Maybe. I guess so.” He pauses. “I mean, somebody ought to. For how it got, in the end.” Harry takes a swallow of his tea, which is still too hot, and he has to fight the sputtering cough that rises in his throat.

Zayn is staring hard at him, with his dramatic face lit from the left. “Why you?” he says finally. “What are you doing here, Harry?”

There are too many answers for Harry’s slow mouth to catch them all. That he is trying to recognize within himself a pointed ignorance for anyone else’s unhappiness; that he didn’t like Zayn going around saying things that weren’t true about him, even when they were a little bit true; that he missed being a part of Zayn’s life, and was jealous of Niall’s initiative.

“I didn’t really think it through,” he says. He is struck dumb by having Zayn in front of him. The pure shock of the physical fact of him, when he’s been pretending Zayn had melted into some unknowable ether two years ago. He reaches across the table to pluck Zayn’s hand up into his own and stares at it, unsure how to proceed. “I’m sorry about everything, though.”

Zayn looks at their hands, loosely joined on the table. He is still so lovely. In another life Harry would’ve razed the countryside with flame or walked a tightrope suspended between the spires of the world trade center or given up his fame for a glimpse of Zayn’s rare, true smile. He brings Zayn’s hand to his lips and kisses his knuckles, then immediately wishes he hadn’t. There’s no way to get back to whatever they once might’ve had. Harry has mapped the circuitous path of their relationship on many sleepless nights, and not once has he found a junction that might let him re-enter to change anything.

The only way forward is through.

Zayn’s hand is soft and relaxed in his, though. He hasn’t pulled away. He’s looking at Harry with his eyebrows raised. “Okay,” he says, and then, “Thank you.”

Harry sets Zayn’s hand gently back down on the table. He sips his tea, now cool. He pulls out his phone and texts his driver.

“I’d like to have your phone number,” he says. “If that’s okay. And then I’d like to come back here sometime with your permission.”

Zayn stares at him, then gets up to find a pen and paper and copies his number down, with his name written underneath. “Don’t make a habit of it,” he says. “Don’t give it to Niall. I think he likes the challenge.”

And that makes Harry laugh, so hard that he has to lean his hand on the tabletop. When he looks up, there’s the hint of a smirk on Zayn’s lips. _Like he went into the attic, dusted it off, and tried it on again to see if it fit._

Harry’s car arrives well before sunset. He’s only spent a couple of hours with Zayn but it feels as though he’s aged years. He’s heading to the door when Zayn stops him, one hand light on his elbow.

“You should change, mate,” he says, and Harry has to scramble upstairs and back into his expensive trousers and the shirt with it’s ridiculous ruffle. When Harry comes back downstairs Zayn gives him an awkward thumbs up.

Harry can’t tell whether he should hug him or not. He pats his shoulder, instead, and tells him he’ll text him, and not to change his number too soon, please. And then he’s in the car, on the dirt road away from the farm, hoping Zayn hadn’t noticed that Harry was still wearing his tennis shoes, his own boots left neatly in the guest bedroom to be discovered later. An excuse to come back, just in case he couldn’t will himself to do it by thought alone.

-

Zayn watches the retreating shape of the car until he can’t distinguish it from the distant tree line. He retrieves his gloves from the porch step where he’d dropped them earlier.

When he’d began staying here he liked the way each day unfurled before him like a blank sheet of paper, unmarred by plans or obligations. All of things he had to do, feeding the chickens and taking the cows out to pasture, weren’t even ostensibly for _him._ He could make himself a non-entity in this place.

_You can’t just take yourself out of the world._

Harry had been here, and it had sent him reeling, yes, but he had also been able to maintain his equilibrium. He thinks so now, mucking out the stables while his two horses have a trot around the outdoor paddock. He thinks about the fact that he has Harry’s phone number, has always had it, and doesn’t necessarily need to wait for him to call.

But Harry will call, he knows. He’s going to wait for it, to feel the unfamiliar sensation of anticipation until he can’t stand it anymore.

So it isn’t Harry who he texts when he gets back inside, the chores done in the barn, itching for a shower.

_hey nialler. sry i been a ghost. new number for ur spreadsheet_

He looks at the text until the speech bubble with three dots appears underneath it, displacing it, and then he sets the phone down and goes to take his shower.

The only way forward is through.

**Author's Note:**

> shows up to the fandom five years late with zayn meta
> 
> might do a follow up to this if i can wrangle it the way i want to, w like a real plot and all
> 
> i'm on tumblr [here](http://warpedtourniall.tumblr.com) if you want to chat at me


End file.
